Pre-election articles are here & here. Election night coverage is here.
Third party candidates as a composite (and where they were allowed on the ballot) had a hard time cracking the 2% threshold in any state. A total media blackout, combined with social media censorship, legal attacks, etc, dooms third-party candidacies to irrelevance, as both major parties claim they have the only “winnable” and “serious” candidates. It’s only when those terms are so distorted by cynical politics that this can be true, as it was in 2024.
The right-wing attack ads were endless and for much of that we have Elon Musk to thank. This crypto-currency billionaire fascist has just been elevated to political power without receiving a single vote. What we have is political opportunism & backroom deals, with nothing for working class voters– red or blue.
No left voice was allowed to be raised & taken seriously in the corporate media during the entire two-year presidential campaign. Jill Stein & the Green party, etc, orbit the Democrats. The Greens message in 2024 was “Vote Kamala, but if you can’t, then vote for Jill Stein instead of Trump.” Does this sound like a serious strategy? How can a political alternative be built with this approach? In short, it isn’t and it can’t.
Meanwhile, RFK, Jr endorsed Trump and (like Elon Musk) is in line for a cabinet position after being kicked out of the Democratic primaries. The Democrats went with a ‘Biden or bust’ strategy, until they couldn’t maintain that fiction anymore. Top CIA Democrats including Barrack Obama forced Joe Biden to step aside for Kamala Harris after his disastrous debate performance with Donald Trump on June 27. By then the primaries were over, with the delegates assigned to Biden, so a replacement candidate had to be installed. The Democratic party primary in 2024 was a rigged farce by any political definition. People noticed, and it surely influenced their voting in the general.
Recall that in 2020, Kamala Harris was schooled & badly defeated by Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) in an early primary debate. Despite being an early favorite (rising star, etc), Kamala Harris quickly faded into irrelevance– until Joe Biden put her on his ticket as VP. Nothing she did earned her that title, she simply checked the right boxes while being a toe-the-party-line yes-woman. No one thought anything of her as a VP, until Joe Biden was being pressured by party leaders & big donors to drop out of the race.
For a former state prosecutor, Kamala Harris is remarkably wooden & dull. She clearly wouldn’t have survived an open & fair primary in 2024. Instead, Kamala Harris was enabled every step of the way, the same way the Democratic party handled candidate Joe Biden until late June. The same way the DNC rigged the machinery & rescued Biden in 2020, and Hillary Clinton in 2016, both times from fake leftist Bernie Sanders (D-VT).
I earlier likened this entire campaign to episodes of House of Cards (2013-18). In Election 2024, Kamala Harris played the role of Jim Matthews/Jackie Sharp, meaning she was used & manipulated by higher powers to achieve their interests, in this case, handing the 2024 election to Trump. Opportunism, addiction to fame, flattery & celebrity, along with hubris allowed Kamala Harris to be manipulated by CIA Democrats– who prefer Trump to anything on the left. Kamala Harris & Joe Biden are now both lame duck losers. Joe Biden finally lost his grip on power because he’s an incoherent zombie. Kamala Harris never really attained any power because she’s a pretender. She’s not ruthless or smart enough in the eyes of the ruling class. That’s how she got played.
Kamala Harris started with all the momentum she needed to win, but ran a conservative run-out-the-clock campaign– befuddling insiders by avoiding press conferences, interviews, etc, for weeks on end. This was when most Americans barely knew who she was. It was a major red flag for someone running for US president, and a turning point for the Trump campaign. To Donald Trump’s credit, he apparently listened (by his standards) to his advisors more in 2024 than in 2020. Trump was able to posture himself as a folksy populist while Kamala was in hiding.
Whoever ran the Harris campaign wasn’t giving her the advice she needed to win. That’s perhaps a House of Cards episode in itself. Kamala Harris needed to tack left, anti-war with voters to beat Trump, but the CIA Democrats wouldn’t allow that. Thus Kamala Harris became politically indistinguishable from Joe Biden. When asked in an interview near the end of the campaign, Kamala Harris said she wouldn’t have done anything different as VP. That made her an easy target for Trump’s attack-ad campaign, bottomlessly funded by right-wing billionaires.
The Democrats relied on identity politics to mask Kamala Harris’ class politics. It didn’t fool voters in key battle ground districts. Being a black woman doesn’t mean anything in the arena of class & power politics. MeToo feminism, Black Lives Matter & LBGTQ+ campaigns are CIA Democratic attack dogs they unleash on the left & working class. It is a program of imperialist entitlement to create a thin later of representative stooges. Most voters despise these well-funded liberal snowflakes.
As I mix among the people the day after Election 2024, I see & hear very little jubilation. People are relieved this debased election is over, but they aren’t optimistic about the future. Most of those who voted for Trump realize he’s a sociopath & ignoramus, but they hate the Democrats even more and blame them for their misery. They have good reason for that, but the fact is nothing can be done about Trump & the CIA Democrats until workers & youth break from both parties of capitalism and take up the fight for socialism.
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org) is the organ of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), which is the Trotskyist party of revolutionary internationalism. Any nationalist reformist programs & union bureaucracies are tools of the capitalist fake left, and must be smashed by worker-led organizations with a revolutionary program, as they all paved the way for Trump.
Speak openly with your friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc, about the important issues which were never discussed during Election 2024. Issues such as the imperialist drive to WW3, capitalist induced climate change, the forever COVID pandemic, attacks on democratic rights along with ever greater social inequality can no longer be ignored & suppressed. The only way these issues will move front & center in public debate is if workers & youth organize and act in revolutionary solidarity against the capitalist ruling class. I encourage all my fans & readers to read the WSWS and join the SEP.
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